Veridian Shores

Chapter 32 - What Home Looks Like

Stepping off the train, Gliss felt like an anvil had been lifted from her shoulders.

Sixteen hours had been an interminable chore on her way down to Veridian Shores, impatient as she'd been to get to work on her mission. This time the long ride had given her time to fully regain the big picture of what she'd achieved. When the Keystone was reunited with the Tomb of the First, her clan would have access to a trove of weapons beyond anything the prancing, posturing fools of Veridian Shores could ever hope for.

She still felt a small twang of guilt for what she'd done to Capper, but now that she'd had time to think it over, she realised it was because he was a vampire in the wrong city. The way he behaved, the way he pushed against all the grandstanding and game-playing; he should have been turned in Iron Hollow. But fate said no. In another life maybe she would have asked him to come with her, but the stakes were too high for decisions to be made on a whim. He'd found that out the hard way.

So when she stepped off the train, Gliss felt a rush of adrenaline that coalesced into one word: success. She'd beaten the odds and made it home in one piece. She breathed it in, the metal and burning of the air and the cold sear of the air that scoured across her skin. The humans here were harder too, their blood strengthened by hard labour in the relentless industry of Iron Hollow. The city militia stumped disinterestedly along their patrol routes, outfitted in a vague uniform of blue and grey and armed with an eclectic mix of firearms.

Gliss walked into the city's grateful embrace, following the deeply engrained route to her true home. The streets formed tightly-knit grids, packed to the seams with growling trucks and freight haulers. Humans marched by in columns, either en route to a shift or making their way to the seedy entertainment districts that hosted innumerable bars, brothels and everything in between.

She made her way through it, conscious of a handful of distant vampire presences. After a few minutes she could pick out two from her clan, apparently shadowing her through the city as she approached. Gliss loped along the main street leading out of the train station and swung herself onto one of the many tram-rails that criss-crossed the gridiron streets. The things weren't quite trains, lacking actual carriages. They were driverless slabs of metal that rolled along carefully placed rails from one end of a grid line to another – faster than walking but slower than a car – and were crammed with support rails for passengers to cling to.

Clamping a hand around one, she tucked her body into the press of bodies already riding this particular tram-rail and hung on for four blocks. Nimbly dismounting, she made a quick check to confirm that her chaperones were still following her. She could still feel them – probably hurtling from rooftop to rooftop to stay out of sight.

Let them skulk, she thought. I'll be home soon, then none of us will have to hide again.

Four more turns through Iron Hollow's grid of streets brought her to the edges of her clan's territory. She passed that invisible boundary with an involuntary smile, gripping the reassuring sphere of the Keystone in her pocket to keep it real in her mind. A small part of her felt the thing might disappear like smoke, unable or unwilling to believe she'd actually pulled this off. But then she cleared the dark concrete masses, able to see home in the flesh at long last.

The home of Clan Tempest.

Unlike the grandiose mansions of Veridian Shores, her clan's abode was altogether different. There were no spires or huge open grounds, no watch towers and no ring walls. Instead it looked like a series of heavily connected bunkers. The largest of them was a hexagonal slab of basalt rock jutting up from the base of a disused quarry, with spidering armoured corridors linking it to a dozen others of varying sizes. It blended with the surrounding rock, and the quarry itself was smothered in a blanket of residential blocks.